“Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public,” Manning wrote.

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States–Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, was a top-secret United States Department of Defense history of the United States’ political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Commissioned by United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967, the study was completed in 1968. The papers were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of the New York Times in 1971.

I happen to have been the target of a White House hit squad myself. On May 3, 1972, a dozen CIA assets from the Bay of Pigs, Cuban émigrés were brought up from Miami with orders to “incapacitate me totally.” I said to the prosecutor, “What does that mean? Kill me.” He said, “It means to incapacitate you totally. But you have to understand these guys never use the word ‘kill.’”

So how can WikiLeaks protect this kind of information, and how has the site managed to protect itself? The answers are on WikiLeaks, actually. On a page called ‘Investigators Guide’, WikiLeaks outlines that it is a media organization, and as such, it has certain protections under various international jurisdictions.

“We have after all for the first time, that I ever perhaps in any democratic country, we have a president who has announced that he feels he has the right to use special operations operatives against anyone abroad, that he thinks is associated with terrorism,” says Ellsberg. “Now as I look at Assange’s case, they’re worried that he will reveal current threats. I would have to say puts his well-being, his physical life, in some danger now. And I say that with anguish. I think it’s astonishing that an American president should have put out that policy and he’s not getting these resistance from it, from Congress, the press, the courts or anything. It’s an amazing development that I think Assange would do well to keep his whereabouts unknown.”

Yesterday, former cracker-turned-hack Kevin Poulson published a story on his “Threat Level” blog, featured on Wired.com. Poulson revealed a 22 year old US army intelligence analyst named Bradley Manning who claimed to be the source of leaked army material to whistleblowing website Wikileaks. Manning had told former hacker Adrian Lamo about his deeds while chatting online and claimed to have leaked 260,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.